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adeelarshad82 writes "A nearly year-long study conducted by WDS on 600,000 support calls has found that Android phones are more susceptible to hardware faults than other types of devices. '14 percent of all technical support calls for Android devices could be traced to a hardware fault, versus 3.7 percent for RIM BlackBerry, 8 percent for iPhones and 9 percent for Windows Phone 7 devices.' WDS attributed the gap in hardware faults to the disparity in OEMs that manufacture Android devices."

Android runs on the full gambit of available phone devices. That means on the low end, crappy hardware is there by design. Crappy hardware, by design, driven by cost considerations, are going to have less reliable hardware and less QA.

Basically the story says, "Shit happens. Sometimes free market economics create products which are far from ideal." Is anyone really surprised. Next story. I mean, that's really all that needs to be said. Duh.

Some(by no means all, sadly) of the cheap dumbphones are both cheap and nigh-immortal, because nobody gives a damn what CPU they are using or how many UberMarks they get on some benchmarking suit that wouldn't fit in the onboard storage anyway. This means that, while they certainly don't use fancy parts, they are polished and solid designs.

The Android low end is extra unfortunate because it suffers from cheapskate-itis and much of the hardware gets churned and replaced by a different design all the time.

FYI: iOS has outsold Android approximately 2:1. And it would seem that Android has a greater proportion of crappy hardware. Android saw declining market share last quarter.

Android doesn't have to "win" to be a good system. It's a *very* good nerd OS, and is also a nice alternative to iOS for consumers. Why are nerds so insecure about their computing choices (while simultaneously being so arrogant about them)? iOS is much better suited

Not all hardware is used across all OSs. Many hardware packages are only available, for example, on Windows or Android, exclusively. Furthermore, look at some of the low end devices from Motorola. Some of them have been real stinkers. IIRC, HTC made a odd here and there too. And, there are lots of other players. In Asia, there are players you've likely never heard of. Quality is typically absolutely shitty and I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers were tossed in to dramatically bulk up shits rates for An

HTC - Makes Android and WinPhones on basically the same hardware... I suspect that the failure rate is comparable

iPhone is one manufacturer - Apple - they do not differentiate between hardware and software errors

Blackberry - again one manufacturer who does not differentiate

Who exactly are they getting these figures?

Yep, and those numbers are fine and dandy and all, but completely meaningless unless you're reporting on each manufacturer, not the OS that runs on them. It's like saying Milk is less healthy than Soda because more people out there are lactose intolerant.

Just to be clear, because you tried to hide it in a lot of hand-waving:

Android phones are more prone to failure than other phones like iPhones and BlackBerries.

I especially like how you tried to make this out to be a good (or at least, deliberate) thing! And you blame this on the "free market". Yes, the exact same "free market" that brings you iPhones and BlackBerries, which fared better.

I mean, really! Apple and RIM are both free to make shitty hardware, but they choose not to. That's "by design" too, and

Are you really that insecure about your "own" platform that you think anything that that is less than glowing praise is perceived as a paid-for trashing by shills working for "the man"? In this case, Apple (and again, on slashdot, nothing they ever do is plain and simple, it's all part of some grand illuminati-style plot to steal your freedoms and enslave the masses while simultaneously destroying open source).

The paranoid conspiracy stuff is just tiresome. It's quite obvious, and stated in the summary even

Perhaps in this instance because who is WDF and of course how do you blame software for "keypad/button failures and microphone and battery issues". In this case "Windows Phone 7, meanwhile, will benefit". So in all, a silly little story based on a silly little study, all paid for by some silly little M$ marketing executive.

There are some android phones that are going to be designed to meet a price point rather than maximum quality. Like MS computers by mass market manufacturers like Dell, customers are going to tolerate a lack of high quality due to the low price. This is also a winning deal for the manufacturers as tech support is no longer hugely expensive.

What is going to be interesting to see is if the MS Windows Mobile phones continue to be more reliable than Android phones if and when the MS Windows phones begin to s

An entirely substantiated conclusion from this data is that "Android phones vary pretty widely in quality and reliability, and there's no way of knowing whether a model is good or bad until after you've bought it." Corporate purchasers are not widely known for their risk-taking behaviors.

Why do you think Google has been slowly ratcheting up the controls and requirements for Android device makers? Because they realized that allowing a crapflood of cheap & shitty devices would tarnish the Android brand,

Well, if you can lump all the android devices together to claim dominance over iPhone marketshare, as is commonly done on here, that includes all the crappy Android handsets as well as the really good ones, then it seems fair to lump them all together when looking at bulk failure rate. You have to take the rough with the smooth.

How about we break down the handsets that are comparable to the iPhone and look at just their marketshare and just their failure rates? I suspect it would be broadly similar on hardw

That alone would make me switch from a BB phone. I have a Tour, which has worked fine for me over the past 13 months, but if a phone needs to be replaced every 90 days, then that phone/(model?) is crap.

Errrrnttt. Nice try. You are correct that the article is committing a statistical error, but so are you. Technical support calls range the gamut from questions, software problems, hardware problems, user errors, help on setup and installation, etc. And you can't lump all the nonhardware issues into "problems strictly with the software" per se because a question could be as simple as "how do I install this" but could be more intricate like asking value added questions about how to best set up wifi or wha

If one platform gets 1000 calls, 100 of which are hardware, this article would say 10% hardware calls, another platform gets 10000 calls 200 of which are hardware and it would say 2% hardware calls.while they are technically right, the later one would, assuming equal number of users, actually have worse hardware.

Now I'm not saying that any one platform is better or worse than the other, or even that their conclusion is wrong, only that the article lacks enough information to actually back up what they are c

If by real message you mean, message spun like a politician was talking, than sure.

Nobody takes incomplete or factually incorrect data and spins it into a good thing like a politician, so therefore I must assume that you and the GP post are also politicians since there is no logical way you would have come to such a conclusion without making things up along the way.

14 percent of all technical support calls for Android devices could be traced to a hardware fault, versus 3.7 percent for RIM BlackBerry, 8 percent for iPhones and 9 percent for Windows Phone 7 devices.'

In other news: '86% of all technical support calls for Android devices could be traced to a software issue, versus 96.3 percent for RIM BlackBerry, 92 percent for iPhones and 91 percent for Windows Phone 7 devices.'

I take it to mean that Android manufactures are more willing to replace a faulty phone than iPhone or rim. They are just better at convincing you that your phone is fine and working as expected, "just hold it different to get better reception"

the thing on pcmag looks like a ripped-off press release - I never heard of WDS but I'm quite sure one can buy the complete study for whatever absurd piles of dollars. In a way this is nice metatrolling: the author auf the pcmag-piece *knows* that such an incomplete information base will lead to huge amounts of flaming - and he won, even slashdot is part of the crowd:)

Ok, look I'm an iphone user. Love it. Have the original and waiting to get the next one. But I'm not putting too much into this little survey.

I need to see the manufacturer listed here before I believe this is any more than propoganda. If it turns out that each manuf. has about the same average fault rate, then ok, there's a problem. But if it turns out that HTC comes out to 2% and Moto is at 25% then I'd say that it's not the OS, but the manuf. that's the problem.

It wouldn't be the OS causing hardware failures. The article is implying that in all cases android phones have more hardware failures. WE know they are not caused by the OS, but the unwashed masses don't.

How could it be the OS? This is about hardware faults, and in fact has nothing to do with Android.

Because a "hardware fault" might be caused by the drivers in the OS.

In other words, if one of the radios in the phone stops working, how can the tech know for sure if the hardware failed or the software is having problems talking to the hardware because the driver has a fault?

All Android stories should be done by model since the compatibility matrix is so complex. The problem is, then Android is not "winning". Considering Android as a single thing is almost always absurd, this story is not really any more absurd then lumping all these same varied devices with 3 different versions of the OS into one pile and calling it Market share.

I'm a rabid Apple fanboi and a temporary Android user - because I needed a cheap non-subsidised smartphone to buy me time between my 3GS dying and the 4s/5 coming out.

Now, if you want a *cheap* first hand smartphone, then it's a straight choice, Symbian or Android, and Android wins, I'm afraid. (I've owned and loved many symbian smartphones but not any that Nokia made!)

So, a quick trip to Argos and I have a ZTE Blade - the things are dirt cheap and effortless to root and install stock android on and the har

Keep in mind that this is 14% of _support calls_. Using the same logic as the summary, you could say that Android phones have fewer software issues than other phones because only 86% of calls are related to software. That is assuming there isn't a third option in support calls.

The article even states this, they don't have shipment numbers for devices so they don't have data for the phones that don't require support. Their sample is only phones that people are having problems with in the first place.

I would be curious to know if the numbers break down along any other useful lines:

For instance, are all the phones(regardless of OS and smart/dumb status) manufactured by a given OEM comparable in reliability? How about all phones by company that designed them? or Smart vs. dumb devices? Are 'flagship' devices more or less reliable than random carrier-branded contract fodder?

Unless android has some magical hardware-killing powers, it seems very unlikely that the OS itself has anything to do with it; b

TFA deson't make any sense. The ratio of technical support that ends up being hardware tells us nothing about the hardware fault rate. It could simply be that people are less likely to have other problems with the phone, or that the users are more technical on average and more likely to be able to solve a non-hardware problem on their own.

But really, the failure rate for A would be 5% whereas the rate for B would be 3.75%.
In short, the article's author is an idiot.

Then, too, there's the people who just walk into the store with the broken hardware because they know it is broken ("it doesn't turn on"), so that also would skew the results. But, the biggest skew of all is the fact that only support calls were part of the survey.

Having run a help desk, I can definitely say that the brighter people don't contact support until it is the last resort, while other people might call for every little thing that is different from their normal experience, except that they won't r

WDS did not disclose how many support calls in general technicians fielded for each platform.

And let us read down a little more before I comment...

"In this study we have not been able to measure PTC for two reasons," Deluca-Smith said via email. "We would require shipment volumes from all of the carriers/OEMs that were part of the 600,000 calls sampled. Many do not share this information with us. [Second,] We sample only calls we take at our contact centers (principally based in the U.S. and Europe); end-u

The study, conducted by WDS, found that 14 percent of all technical support calls for Android devices could be traced to a hardware fault, versus 3.7 percent for RIM BlackBerry, 8 percent for iPhones and 9 percent for Windows Phone 7 devices.

WDS did not disclose how many support calls in general technicians fielded for each platform.

And there you have it. If the platforms had, say, the same amount of hardware trouble calls as non-Android platforms but a far lower number of software trouble calls y

Hey Slashdotters, looks like we've been trolled again! After that story that just was released about Android having supposedly crappier apps a couple days ago. This is just garbage. And for the past few months, I can't seem to mod these stories down.

I think the Apple schills/PR machine is turning on their control of the tech media even more (releasing thinly veiled "news stories"), because they can't realize they can win on features/openness/technical merit. I mean geez, they knock android, but don't even m

I'm an Apple fanboy but even I can see through my Apple coloured glasses and recognize that this is entirely slanted. Comparing phones made by Apple (one manufacturer) and RIM (one manufacturer) to Android phones (how many manufacturers?...) is entirely unfair. I'd like to see how HTC does. How about Samsung. Compare manufacturers to manufacturers. Apples to apples, if you pardon the pun. The might as well compare Apple's and RIM's phones to American automobiles for all the value the information provides...

Well, like I mentioned earlier (although the study is statistically flawed), Android users love to flaunt their dominant marketshare by lumping all Android handsets together to make the number large, so they can't really complain when that same set of phones is taken as the data set for "so what's the failure rate?".

Why? When Android fans push their collective market share compared to Apple and RIM, they scoff when it is pointed out there is not one Android phone but a multitude. (As in: Each of those manufacturers compete with the others, a sale of an Xperia Play does not help Samsung one bit.) So if "Android" is supposed to be treated as one platform THEN, the Android fans should accept that Android is treated as one platform NOW.

I have to call bullshit on this article. 14% of technical support calls were related to hardware faults, but it says nothing of the per capita rates of technical service calls. I find it far more likely that either a) android is far more easy to deal with issues yourself or b) used by a more technical user base. Either of these situations would result in less calls related to software issues, which would make the % of support calls that are hardware related go up significantly. Until they release inform

I love my Nexus One, but I have to say the statistics are probably true. I have to reboot it a couple of times per week - the touch screen stops working, or the screen just turns black when I am receiving or making a call. Sometimes I have to resort to removing the battery. A co-worker with a Nexus One is having similar problems, so it is not that my specific device is defective.

As much as I hate Apple, my wife's IPhone 3GS hasn't had any problems whatsoever and she's had it for longer.

Meh. I switched from Apple products to Android after every single Apple product I had recently (iPod touch, 2 iPod nanos, iPod classic) all stopped working in about a year. My iPod nanos would also tend to reboot without warning and for no reason a couple times a week. My Archos 5 with Android hasn't had a single problem since the day I bought it, other than ones I've caused (leaving it in the pocket of the hoodie I used as a pillow and cracking the touch screen -- but even that was a $20 fix)

I believe it's supposed to do that, but only when you hold it up to your head. So, you could be doing something that confuses the sensors. I know that if I put too much of my hand over the screen while on a call, the screen will go black on my HTC Thunderbolt. Hitting "Home" solves that for me, as once the phone app doesn't have the focus, it won't black the screen.

It isn't that, I think. The phone is ringing, but the screen remains black so there is no way to answer. Often I have another problem - it can't hang up; just locks up there and only removing the battery fixes it.

In a strange way it is by far the best phone I have ever had, and by far the most unreliable one:-)

When you include Yugos, Trabants, and Ladas, foreign cars have much worse reliability than Ford.

I really hate it when the media writes dumbassed articles like this. "Let's compare phones made by 30 different companies with a phone made by 1 company and see if there are quality variations." Abject stupidity.

But it is ok to compare sales on those terms, even though 18 months of Android "winning" has still not brought even 1/20th of the iOS revenue to Android developers? The gap is still growing, not narrowing.

I agree it is not fair or relevant to compare devices from 30 manufactures on a wide variety of OS versions to one or two devices from one manufacture. It is always a meaningless comparison.

In a comparison of operating systems, it's fair to compare sales of one operating system to another. In a comparison of phone design and build quality, it's stupid to compare phones using one operating system to phones using another. Compare phones by brand, not by type (unless you're willing to admit that Toyota is crap because Yugo made hatchbacks too). The operating system has absolutely nothing to do with the design and build quality of the physical hardware.

Android's API includes a number of functions for causing various hardware malfunctions. They are designed for use by the carriers. The carriers occasionally invoke them in order to increase their sales. Apple & RIM lock their phones down. The carriers can't mess with them, so they don't accrue these benefits. Sound good?

A fundamentally broken metric: "percent of all technical support calls".A completely incorrect interpretation of that metric: "Android Phones More Prone To Hardware Problems".

If you want to argue that "Android Phones More Prone To Hardware Problems", then you need to know the number phones of each type that have hardware failures, and total phones of each type (or possibly total usage hours of each) -- and neither of those are known or estimated here. Other possible explanations for higher "percent of all t

I didn't read TFA (because I don't care about phones), but I don't need to do it to tell that the news title in/. is stupid. Having the stats of 14% of problems being due to hardware doesn't tell the global failure rate. So, let's say we have 0.00001% of failure rate with android phones, and 1% with others, with still 14% of problems being due to hardware on the Android platform, that doesn't make Android more susceptible for hardware issue, does it? So, either the linked article is stupid, either the summ

Not exactly. It's more like saying Windows PCs are more prone to hardware problems than Macs. With the iPhone and Blackberries, you have devices from one manufacturer with a relatively high standard of quality control. Windows Phone isn't so rigid, but still, the companies currently manufacturing Windows Phone devices are on the relatively high-end.

With Android, pretty much any schmuck can sell a cheap tablet with a resistive touch screen running the OS - you only need Google's approval to ship with the

Bad experiences with crappy hardware running Android will tarnish the Android name in the consumer's mind.

Only if consumers are buying an Android phone. The advertising I see usually pushes the carrier or the manufacturer. Android is a bullet statement. For example, driving in to work I heard an Ad for Cricket offering the Ascend phone "powered by Android" (manufactured by Chinese company Huawei - I suspect this is right in line with the subject at hand). Which leads me to wonder what name will come to mind if the consumer looks at their device and decides it's a crappy phone. Will they blame Cricket, Huaw

Now, PR people do understand this, and they do sometimes drop hit pieces. But the natural defense mechanism is that there are people who actively follow this stuff and look for those kinds of shenanigans. For example, here's a story that accuses the Obama administration of feeding a story to the WaPo [pajamasmedia.com]. When PR people try to stir up a story, it's very easy to be caught out, so that naturally limits them to dropping a few hints.

The article is over five years old, but I think it still is quite applicable today: The Submarine [paulgraham.com]. The trick seems to be having awareness of this manipulation, looking for it, and being able to communicate those findings. Politics breeds that kind of watchdog (especially in the current environment). But I don't think you'll find it in every arena on every issue.

That's not to say your view lacks insight. I suspect there is a lot of news that is news because it was in the news - especially within tech.

The Storm units sucked (everyone I know who bought one either hated it or has it stashed in a drawer with the rest of their defunct tech), but you could play tennis with a Curve 8330, walk away from the match, and continue making calls on it without thinking twice.